


Five things Mo and Mhairi didn't expect to have in common

by machiavellijr



Category: The Laundry Files - Charles Stross
Genre: Gen, Misses Clause Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 22:44:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5516039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/machiavellijr/pseuds/machiavellijr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Considering that their first meeting was Mo very nearly murdering Mhari, the TPCF is a black joke and they're liable to eat each other in moments of extreme stress, it's funny what two of the Laundry's odder ducks can find to agree on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five things Mo and Mhairi didn't expect to have in common

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lakester](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lakester/gifts).



**1\. They didn't always dress in black. It just sort of happened.**

 

“...and STAY out! Honestly, who decided a super called “Slimeball” should be allowed to be the public face of anything. Even the bunch of time-wasters we got the first time were better than that.” Mo rakes her fingers through her hair, winced at the feeling of... goo... dripping from her fringe. “And my suit's had it, too, unless camouflage green and grey is in this season.”

 

“Oh well, no great loss. Sorry, that was bitchy, wasn't it?”

 

 _Yes, Mhari. Yes it was. All today needed was another reminder that I'm getting old. Dowdy. A stick-in-the-mud civil servant, or a monster's zookeeper, your choice._ “I suppose so. I'd better go back to black in future, I suppose. And how the heck am I supposed to meet that leering twit from the Ministry looking like the undercard in a jelly-wrestling contest?” Like many illusions, Mo's limited respect for the government had not long survived close contact with its members.

 

“You know, someone with powers of mystic dry-cleaning would come in handy. Any of those on the list? No, thought not. Anyway, do stick to the black. The Rt Hon Giblets was a banker before he was a bag-carrier, and serious women wear black. You don't think I look like a French mime because I think it suits me, do you?”

 

_No, but I didn't need the reminder that you had a real career a damn sight more recently than I did. Nor did I need the fashion tips, kiddo.Oh well, she's probably trying to help in her poisonous little way. On with the impossibilities._

 

**2\. Compared to many people they encounter, they're not all that out of touch. That's not saying much.**

 

“Done. Matthew, please take Mr. Nicotine – Nikita – Nikitovitch – escort our latest would-be Nick Fury back to the Department of Education, tell him his proposal is under consideration, stop smirking yes I have seen _Yes Minister_ and I do know what that phrase means, give him some souvenirs from the PR tat pile, and if you're pushing for extra Brownie points please for the love of God come back with lunch. Right. Mhari, professional judgement time – do you think our cover is better served by telling him to sod off for good on national security grounds because we don't let Russian-Syrian 'biznizmen' fiddle with the Front Line of British Superheroism, or is it beautifully internationalist to have a foreigner who's already sunk a fortune into British institutions on board?”

 

“God. Total disaster when it hits the _Sun_. The _Guardian_ might like it – his schools probably educated half their kids – but if we wanted to please the tofu-munching types we'd not be running TPCF in the first place. Get rid of him, publicly, give Matthew credit for spotting a potentially dangerous situation and wave the flag every chance you get. Public won't give a toss but the authorities will lap it up.”  


“How do you mean? I'd have thought it'd be the other way round.”

 

“I referee overeducated boys for a living – well, not so overeducated now, but the principle's the same. This is the sort of thing they'd think the public would care about, because they've never actually met anyone who wasn't, well, people like your husband used the phrase 'bloodsucking parasite' even before my new condition, and they learned popular politics from their PPE degrees.”

 

“Whereas we, of course, are 'down wit' da kids', right?”  
  
“Point taken. I suppose saving the world from gibbering horrors isn't much more real-world than saving the fortunes of the mega-rich from stagnation. What's next, boss?”  


“Meeting with Janice from the Home Office about our crisis policy. Apparently all public bodies have required one since 2008, who knew?”

 

“I think ours is, 'yes there is a crisis, isn't there always?'”

 

**3\. There are worse things than being a woman in the modern world of occult bureaucracy. Being pitied for it counts.**

 

Matthew is that rarest of birds – a high-flying young political economist who got caught by the Laundry drag-net shortly before it stopped recruiting anyone who heard a bump in the night. Matthew is tall, handsome, young and very nearly as capable as he thinks he is. For a consultant, he appears to have a conscience, his Catholic faith survived both McKinsey and the Laundry, and he tries hard to be nice to the bureaucrats and nerds who are now his colleagues. He considers himself a force for progressive thinking, and in the consulting world he probably was. Matthew is a pain in the neck.

 

“God, this is just typical of the whole fossilised Civil Service mentality. Treating an older woman like she's _invisible_. I know you're busy, Mo, do you want me to work up a complaint to the CSRB? It's just so _unprofessional_ , you know? I'd have expected it from those fascists at McKinsey, but public servants ought to be held to a higher standard.”

 

 _I don't have time for this crap._ “Thanks for your support, Matthew, but I actually am invisible sometimes. Side effect of the job, it seems.” Matthew clearly isn't sure whether Mo is being sarcastic, and lets the matter slide for a moment.

 

Just long enough, in fact, for Mhari to jump in. “I'm sure Mo - being, as she is, Professor Doctor O'Brien to the likes of you – can cope perfectly well if there's any issue. Didn't you have some spreadsheets to play with?” Mhari is not Matthew's manager, has never suffered fools for a moment (however _did_ she cope with Bob?) and tends to regard civil servants as her natural prey.

 

“Mhari, please, I totally get where you're coming from and obviously it's not my place as a white man” - _sod your place as a white man, how about your place as my junior by seventeen years? -_ “to come in and save the day, much less to take exception to how you express your frustrations, but I'm just trying to offer a bit of moral support. We all need that sometimes.”

 

Mo and Mhari share a long-suffering glance. Moral support, eh? Nice to have, but if the silly boy ever sees enough horror to understand what kind of support an obligate serial killer and … whatever Mo is … actually need, they've already failed.

 

**4\. They really don't like the Laundry. They do not, however, quite agree on why.**

 

Mo swirls her warm white wine contemplatively, and wonders vaguely whether being basically a start-up and thus not messing around with pointless social rituals like an office Christmas party outweighs being much more fundamentally a government agency and therefore obliged to have Organised (alleged) Fun. Half her nerds are standing about making awkward small talk, the other half are singing something remarkably offensive about Sleeping Beauty and the Responsible Adults (a status for which age is neither necessary nor sufficient) have inevitably coagulated in a corner near the wine.

“So, Bob kind of a bit explained why you're here now, but do you mind awfully telling me how an HR executive of all things ended up in the Laundry in the first place? I mean, I should have your file, but it's still lost in the outer spiral arm of the New Stacks.”  
  
“Well. Obviously if I tell you I have to kill you – Jesus Christ Mo, I know you're my boss, that was a joke – but I'll give you some advice. Never go out with a man who says he's inherited freaky mystic powers from a teacher at his school, in case you have to stab his possessed corpse with a carving knife. And then you spend three years doing paperwork for this fossilised corpse of an intelligence agency. I mean, it took me two months to work out it wasn't just a make-work system for total loons.”

 

Mhari doesn't really _do_ impassioned ranting, for all Bob's reminiscing about her instability, and Mo isn't sure vampires can get all that drunk. There's an angle here somewhere. _What do you want, Mhari?_ “You mean it isn't? And there was little old me thinking Total Quality Management was essential to preserving the world from Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.”  
  
“See, even you do it. It's not a fucking joke, Mo. If we're really trying to save the world, honest-to-god James Bond style, why do we hamstring ourselves with all this bollocks? Why are we messing about with ISO 9000 when there are allegedly people trying to end fucking humanity?”  
  
It's not a bad question, even if hyper-driven Mhari would never ask it in the office. Apparently vampires can get drunk if you pour enough pinot grigio down them. But how terribly little she knows. Mo got a lot of the general shape of the Laundry's ops and mission from Bob; Agent CANDID can't be allowed to know anything Lecter really shouldn't. Why should anyone have told Mhari just how bad things are going to get? “Because it actually works, a bit. We need to have everything perfectly documented, because if we drop dead tomorrow some poor sod has to take over. And if we end up fighting to the last conscripted grunt, well, our management will feel it's been well done if it was in accordance with standing orders and procedures. And damn them all, they might just be right.”  
  
“No. Either it's urgent, and we need to be taking fucking action, go public(ish), gloves off and start fighting back, or it isn't and we're just a research agency playing with ultra-classified toys, in which case we need a bit of actual innovation. Maybe that's where we come in.” _Oh, you have no idea._

 

“Mhari, you can stop there. Yeah, the Laundry is downright inhuman, subject to every single one of the many failure modes of elite research organisations and a dozen more besides. Trust me when I say its gloves are too damn far off already.”  
  
Mhari looks dubious. As if an organisation with its gloves on properly would be keeping a half-dozen honest-to-Weedon vampires on strength in the first place. Maybe she knows that. Maybe she's... counting on it.

 

5\. **Neither of them intends to carry on being monsters. Not forever. Just until it's safe to stop.**

 

“You haven't really given it up, have you Mo?” Mhari looks incredulous. She's been walking wide of Mo for so long she's almost forgotten how scared she is of Lecter, and now suddenly the Sword of Damocles might have up and vanished.

 

“Yes, Mhari. It's gone. It decided it owned me, it killed several hundred approximately innocent concert-goers, and now I'm rid of it. I could sing and dance, except I'm apparently on the fast track to being an Auditor. Which is worse, so kindly accept that yes, I can put down great power and responsibility, and I'm still running TPCF until relieved, so we've got work to be doing.”

 

“So you go from the scariest thing in the Laundry's cupboard of monsters to... an auditor. Some comedown.” Mhari is not appropriately scared of the Auditors. Maybe she never met them. Maybe Bob's youthful melodrama convinced her they can't be as bad as all that. Or maybe she just really, really wishes she could put down her own supernatural thirst.

 

I hope that's right.


End file.
